“When asked about his past, ARATH smiles and artfully avoids the question. From what you can gather, he was born in Athkatla, the son of a wealthy nobleman, and grew up in relative peace until he discovered his father’s ties to the slave trade. Furious at his father’s involvement in people-trafficking, he ran away, eventually joining the local Druid Grove and studying to become a druid himself. Arath is quick both on his feet and in his speech, words tumbling out often before he can finish the last, and has a marked appreciation for the beauty of nature. Though he is in his mid-twenties, he exudes a confidence and charisma of one far older than his years would suggest. His eyes sparkle as you probe him with questions, but he does not answer them, saying only that he feels no need to recount the past when the present is so much more interesting.”

Arath is a complex, self-assured, humorous and somewhat hedonistic druid who, on the surface, cares for little else beyond himself and his love for nature. He loves the human form, both male and female, and isn’t afraid to be direct about what he wants—though he’s not always successful in getting it, much to his chagrin. He has a passionate hate for aberrations, the undead and anything else that falls beyond the natural scheme of things, and he has some rather complex and occasionally contradictory beliefs.

We have decided to move forward our forum overhaul, upgrade the software and move hosts to tomorrow. Over the next few days uptime may be patchy, but we’ll do our best to complete the upgrades, overhaul and move as swiftly as possible so as to prevent too much more downtime.

The forums will go offline tomorrow (23 January 2012) at 6pm GMT +9.5 (Adelaide time). To find out what time this will be in your timezone, head here.

I’m sorry for the short notice, but the sooner we get this done the better! Thanks in advance for your patience.

P.S. During this time, any @spellholdstudios.net email accounts will no longer function. With this in mind, if there are any queries, please send them to .

This major release overhauls the installation process to minimise dependence on fallible shell scripts and enables installation on Linux systems out of the box. Updates have been made to multiple translations, and the Czech translation has been added. A few new features have been added, including default Baldur’s Gate soundsets, the end of Tales of the Sword Coast screen, and subtitles for the Baldur’s Gate introduction movie. Quite a number of bugs have been fixed.

Important for mega-mod installers: the installation has an extra prompts whether to biff all files or just some. The recommended command line command for auto-installation is now

Sorry for the forum downtime yesterday; as a part of our upgrade process something went awfully wrong, and almost our entire members database was deleted, sending me and SConrad (let’s be honest, mostly SConrad) into a frenzy of fixing.

He has managed to restore most things to what they were before the deletion, but you will notice some oddities. Post-counts may be slightly different, last-posted-by in various forums may be wrong, any PMs from the last week have been deleted, and most unfortunately, almost any avatar and personal photo added or changed within the last two years is permanently gone.

We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience. SC has done an amazing job to get us back on track, so big props to him!

Thanks everyone.

P.S. Hopefully any remaining problems will be ironed out when we do our forum upgrade/overhaul sometime next week!

And to round off our releases this 12 Days, we have a new mod from Enkida!

This will upgrade various BioWare and player-made NPCs so they have a somewhat “standardized” look - similar head sizes, color range, and an attempt to be semi-faithful to the original BioWare artwork “look.” You can see all included portrait upgrades in this thread!